U.S. Senators in bipartisan deal on immigration bill
Senator Edward Kennedy, center, at a news conference in Washington Thursday with, from left, Senators Dianne Feinstein, Mel Martinez, Saxby Chambliss and Johnny Isakson. (Jamie Rose for The New York Times)
WASHINGTON: Senate negotiators from both parties announced Thursday that they had reached agreement on a comprehensive immigration bill that would offer legal status to most of the nation's 12 million illegal immigrants while also toughening border security.
If the bill becomes law, it would result in the biggest changes in immigration law and policy in more than 20 years. That would provide President George W. Bush with a political lift and a tangible accomplishment for his second term. It would also be a legislative achievement for the new Democratic leaders in Congress, though they said they would seek changes in the measure.
At the heart of the bill is a significant political trade-off. Democrats got a legalization program, which they have sought for many years. Republicans got a new "merit-based system of immigration," intended to make the United States more competitive in a global economy.
But the politics of the deal are precarious. Democrats are already trying to tamp down concerns of Hispanic groups, who fear that the bill would make it more difficult for immigrants to bring relatives from abroad. At the same time, Republican negotiators face blistering criticism from some conservatives, who say the bill would grant a virtual amnesty to people who had broken the law.
Bush praised the Senate measure, which incorporates many of his ideas, saying, "I really am anxious to sign a comprehensive immigration bill as soon as I possibly can."
The bill goes next week to the Senate floor, where negotiators predicted that it would receive overwhelming support. One reason for that optimism was the partnership in evidence at the news conference where the package was announced by 10 senators, including Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, a liberal Democrat, and Jon Kyl of Arizona, a conservative who is chairman of the Senate Republican Conference.
Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, came off the presidential campaign trail to embrace the compromise, a potentially risky step because the proposal is unpopular with many conservatives, who are expected to play a large role in choosing the party's presidential candidate.
The measure's prospects are less clear in the House, which plans to take up immigration in July.
Representative Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, said, "Unless the White House produces 60 or 70 Republican votes in the House, it will be difficult to pass an immigration bill similar to the Senate proposal."
Representative Xavier Becerra, Democrat of California and a former chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, said he had grave concerns about the Senate bill.
"It's a pretty radical shift to go to an employment-based visa system as opposed to a family system," Becerra said in an interview. "You will continue to have close family members separated from their loved ones because of this policy."
The bill includes a temporary-worker program, under which 400,000 to 600,000 foreign workers could be admitted to the country each year.
Becerra said the proposal would create "a permanent underclass of imported workers to fill American jobs."
The Senate majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, offered cautionary words as well, saying: "I have serious concerns about some aspects of this proposal, including the structure of its temporary-worker program and undue limitations on family immigration. We need to improve the bill as it moves through the legislative process."
Kennedy has acknowledged that the agreement is not the immigration bill he would have written in another political environment. But on Thursday he said, "The agreement is the best possible chance we will have in years to secure our borders and bring millions of people out of the shadows and into the sunshine of America."
Besides creating a path toward legalization for illegal immigrants, the bill would strengthen the border through the addition of more fencing and other security measures and an increase in the number of Border Patrol agents.
The deal sets the stage for a rare victory for Bush, who set a goal of establishing a new immigration system at the start of his presidency but saw it stymied by his own party.
As the governor of Texas, Bush had seen firsthand the challenges of border security and the lengths to which impoverished Mexicans were willing to go to enter this country illegally. What he depicted as "a rational immigration system" — one that would offer a temporary-worker program and a way for those who have set up working lives here illegally to become citizens — was a major part of his "compassionate conservative" agenda.
But the Sept. 11 attacks derailed his plan, and by the time he set out to enact it in his second term conservatives were livid over what they called deplorably inadequate efforts to secure the border. That anger, repeated nightly on talk radio and by the CNN host Lou Dobbs, remains, and is seen within the Republican Party as a motivating force for conservative voters in the next presidential election.
soon as the agreement was announced, players on both sides of the immigration issue rolled out their defense and their offense.
Tony Snow, the White House press secretary, defended the proposal in a television appearance on "Lou Dobbs Tonight," whose host has become one of the most vocal critics of Bush's immigration policy.
Dobbs opened the program by calling the deal an apparent victory for "the pro-illegal-alien lobby." The administration was "hellbent on creating a North American union without the consent of the American people," he said, and the plan could "threaten national sovereignty and security as well."
John Sweeney, president of the AFL-CIO, denounced the bill from a different angle, saying it would create "a massive guest worker program."
"All workers will suffer because employers will have available a ready pool of labor they can exploit to drive down wages, benefits, health and safety protections and other workplace standards," Sweeney said.
Senator Byron Dorgan, Democrat of North Dakota, said he would offer an amendment to eliminate the guest worker program from the bill.
Under the merit-based system envisioned in the bill, the government would adopt a point system to evaluate the qualifications of many people seeking permission to immigrate. Points would be awarded for job skills, education and English language proficiency.
Negotiators emphasized that foreign-born spouses and minor children of American citizens would continue to receive preference in the allocation of visas.
Moreover, they said, family ties would be an advantage in the proposed point system. If two applicants had the same skills and the same educational credentials, but one also had relatives in the United States, that person would receive the visa.
The negotiators insisted that the legalization program was different from amnesty because illegal immigrants would have to pay fines and go through background checks. They could work in the United States under probationary status and could receive renewable four-year "Z visas." Heads of households would have to return to their home countries to apply for green cards if they wanted to become lawful permanent residents and then citizens.
Many of the presidential candidates reacted cautiously to the agreement.
Senator Barack Obama, Democrat of Illinois, said he "did not want to prejudge the deal" before he had an opportunity to study the legislation. Obama said that he favored strengthening border security and creating a pathway to citizenship, but that he was troubled by the temporary-worker system and the proposed point system.
"Those two things represent significant changes," Obama said. "Whether they work to stabilize the immigration system and whether they are just and human is something that I'm still concerned about."
Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democrat of New York, said she had not had an opportunity to review the proposal.
Clinton said she would examine the proposal "to see if it honors our nation's principles and proud immigrant heritage while also respecting the rule of law."
John Edwards, another Democratic candidate, said he had concerns about parts of the proposal, including a "poorly conceived guest worker program."
Among the major Republican contenders, immigration has been a potentially troubling issue for McCain and Rudolph Giuliani because of their previous stances.
Another Republican candidate, Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, issued a blistering denunciation of the proposal, saying it was "unfair to the millions of people who have applied to legally immigrate to the U.S."
Reporting was contributed by Michael Cooper, Michael Luo and Marc Santora from New York, and Jeff Zeleny from Washington.
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